Health promotion
Conveners: Professor M L Wahlqvist (Medicine) and Professor J J Mc Neil (Social and Preventive Medicine) * Coordinator: Dr Bridget Hsu-Hage (Medicine)
The aims are (1) to introduce students to the range of health promotion concepts from specific interventions or health enhancement in individuals to community-wide prevention or health protection programs; (2) to provide students with opportunities to develop attitudes appropriate to the practice of health promotion in medical practices; (3) to give students personal and professional skills that are required for health promotion; and (4) to involve students in consideration of the social, cultural, economic and political issues associated with doctors' involvement in health promotion. On completion of the course, students should be able to (1) acknowledge people as the main health resource, to support and enable them to keep themselves, their families and friends healthy, and to accept the community as the essential voice in matters of its health, living conditions and well being; (2) to actively play roles that doctors may be called upon to play in health promotion; (3) to understand the basic principles of behaviour change and management, the scientific, social, cultural and economic bases of health promotion, as well as the political and ethical issues that affect health promotion activities; and (4) to suggest appropriate strategies for individual, community and media levels of health promotion.
Assessment
Project presentation and report: 50% * Examination (multiple choice and short answer): 30% * Workbook: 20%
Required reading
Hsu-Hage B H-H (ed.) Student workbook: Health promotion Department of Medicine, Monash University, 1994
Preliminary reading
Egger G and others Health promotion strategies and methods McGraw-Hill, 1990
Recommended texts
Abelin T and others Measurements in health promotion and protection WHO Regional Publications, European Series no. 22, 1987
Badura Band Kickbusch I Health promotion research: Towards a new social epidemiology WHO Regional Publications, European Series no. 37, 1991
Kaplun A (ed.) Health promotion and chronic illness: Discovering a new quality of health WHO Regional Publications, European Series, no. 44, 1993
Mc Neil J and others A textbook of preventive medicine Edward Arnold, 1990